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Comment by oblib | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm... I became a single parent when my daughter was 10 months old and I was 26 years old. There are laws in some States against dropping your sick child off at a daycare provider, and that makes sense, but it also meant I had to stay home with her.

Because of that I was struggling to make ends meet so every dollar I earned was desperately needed. For the most part "Single Moms" are far more common than single fathers and they generally make less money than men so charging a single parent to park a car will take away a lot more for them than most others. And it will cost low income families more than others.

So this sounds like yet another "screw the poor more" idea to me. I'd much rather see a tax on the wealthy to deal with the cost mentioned in this article.

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"Screw the poor more"

is accurate if you ignore that a large portion of the poor don't have access to a reliable vehicle; and that commutes lead to community segmentation and increase inequality.

And that's part of policy point of this. If traffic is decreased, and premium parking is a luxury; then a community is forced into a more local economy that's less dependent on the cars - be it walkable or usable public transit.

More info https://inequality.org/research/public-transit-inequality/

That only works if the "usable public transit" is in place. And we also have to consider that a large portion of the poor do have a reliable vehicle. I have personally kept a lot of those running for friends and family and the idea of only the wealthy being able to afford a parking space they too subsidize with taxes they pay feels pretty wrong to me.

With centrally managed dynamic pricing, we can subsidize parking directly for low-income people, instead of just subsidizing everyone in the city (which of course leads to crap like Parking Panda, where the rich can just pay someone to squat spots at their convenience).

Further, the places where a system like this is cost effective is a place where the revenue can go toward implementing meaningful public transit. Having a car shouldn't be table stakes for being able to provide for your kid in a metropolitan area.

The reality is that were very far from this infrastructure being practically anywhere but nyc.

Now I agree we need to do something but it'll just end up being an extra tax that will affect the poor more than others. If we don't tax everyone than it defeats the purpose of using taxes to drive behaviors. So we can't subsidize because that defeats the goal.

People who have cars say that a lot. I know too many people without cars to believe that mass transit is unusable nationwide. The idea that having to pay for on-street parking will ruin people's lives is frankly ridiculous, and hasn't panned out anywhere these systems have been implemented.

If on-street parking is crucial to the well-being of humanity, then we can absolutely subsidize it for lower-income people, just as we do for so many other things we've deemed critical. It's as simple as issuing a prox card that results in free or lower-cost parking. With a centrally managed parking system capable of dynamic pricing, there is no barrier to this strategy.

Finally, the whole purpose of using taxes to drive behaviors is that you're not taxing the people who don't engage in the behavior. That's how it works.

I moved to a part of Chicago where parking is very expensive. I got rid of my car. I thought I'd need it far more than I did. The ~$500 a month I spent on the loan/insurance/gas/basic maintenance plus $200-300 for a spot (in addition to any other parking when you go places) is just an insane expense compared to the $2.25 train ride that gets me most places and $800/month covers plenty of $20 rideshares for areas not covered by public transit.

Most rides we'd take in NYC would cost at least 40-60 a ride. That gets blown really quickly when you visit family every other week, and have to take a kid to sports practices a couple of times a week.

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